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1. What makes a great tool?
2. How Epic works with the community on contributions, e.g., pull requests through GitHub
3. UMG (Slate UI) - Unreal Motion Graphics - Goals and status
4. Sequencer! Status and roadmap for the the successor to Unreal Matinee
5. Blender support - Update on progress & how folks can help
6. Additional features, e.g., Nick D.'s Blueprint copy/paste tool

Community Spotlight

Live Q&A

As a reminder, broadcast recordings are posted at this YouTube playlist within a few days airing live. Please ask any questions here in this thread!

Last edited by Chance Ivey; 10-13-2014 at 05:26 PM.
Reason: special announcement

I'd like to hear what the plans are for opening up the engine and editor (and tools) to contributions via the marketplace? Specifically how are you planning on handling integration in a safe way, one that can be easily isolated etc.

I'd also like to hear about ways to secure key data, for instance a few people have been having issues with corrupted blueprints. Can we hear about how you plan to avoid that kind of corruption within the new toolsets? (i.e. my preference is an open file format that can be stored in a source control system).

First of all thank you guys for doing such an awesome job on Unreal Engine 4! It's a lot of fun to work with it.

Now for the questions:

1. Would be awesome if you can talk a bit about if you have any plans on supporting Area Lights in the future builds? I'm talking about an actual AreaLight component. So that you can chose the shape of it (rectagular, cylindrical, spherical, disc), size, color, intensity, apply textures to it (with support for animated textures) etc. Kinda like Guerilla Games did for Killzone: Shadow Fall http://www.guerrilla-games.com/prese...hadow_Fall.pdf (page 62). I think it would be a great thing to have!

2. Now that Lens Flare editor is gone in UE4 (or may be I'm a derp and couldn't find it. Which is a possibility ), is there any plans on adding something new to replace it or bringing the old editor from UE3 back? Because I'm like J.J. Abrams. I love lens flares and current per-pixel solution, while it looks nice, doesn't satisfy all my needs. I need more cinematic anamorphic lens flares everywhere!

It would be interesting to hear about 2D support and on progress and plans for Paper2D. What are your goals with that? This is one of the few areas where Unity still clearly beats UE.

I know, who cares about 2D. But on mobile (and even on PC) I don't see 2D disappearing anywhere soon. For indies this will always be a valid choice and every game can benefit from the awesomeness that is Blueprints, Materials, Matinee, Cascade...

Epic is replacing Matinee? Is there any info on that already? What's bad with Matinee? I didn't use it much so far, apart from the most basic tutorials, so I really don't know. The UI is a little big "strange" maybe.

My question is on the AI tools (Behavior trees): Do you have an eta on when they will be taken out of experimental and fully documented? Also, along those lines better navmesh documentation for programmers would be welcomed as well.

Since this live seems focused a bit on tools, I was wondering if there was any plan on upgrading/enhancing the current color correction tools ? I have in mind a live editing tool similar to what the Source Engine offer (see https://developer.valvesoftware.com/...lor_correction ). Or maybe bringing back the UE3 workflow that allowed users to tweak easily the scene colors (via Highlights, Midtones, Shadows) ?

I am looking forward to the support for Blender. I don't have the money for Maya or 3d Max. So this will be great!!

It's great to see how Epic listens to the community. Professionals probably use Maya or 3DS, so UE never really had to bother much with Blender. But with the new affordable licensing a lot of indies are coming to the engine who will often prefer Blender over the other expensive options.

It's great to see how Epic listens to the community. Professionals probably use Maya or 3DS, so UE never really had to bother much with Blender. But with the new affordable licensing a lot of indies are coming to the engine who will often prefer Blender over the other expensive options.

I posted this on the Blender Artists forums as well as sent a news tip submission to Blendernation. Which I expect it to be going up soonish...

Thank you for supporting Blender. Expect more people showing up tomorrow for the LiveStream just to hear about blender support.

- HeadClot

Good idea. People over on the Blender forums seem to be interested as well. It might be a good idea to move this topic closer to the beginning for those people who are just tuning in for this part. Either way, this live stream will be very interesting, Blueprint pastebin, Slate UI, Blender, Sequencer.. nice!

On the topic of tools, I vaguely recall mention of there being some integration with Excel. If I'm remembering correctly:

How does it work? Does the engine read the .xls file or is it via OLE? Can we access the imported data via blueprints? Any thoughts on supporting other formats, such as OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Google Docs (via Google App Script formatting the data into json or whatever), or even just .csv, json, relational databases, xml, or whatever other formats people store data with?

It's actually .csv import, so anything that can export to .csv will work; our designers use Excel. It's not currently exposed to Blueprints, you need to create new subclasses of FTableRowBase with the properties you want to import, and UDataTable stores/manages a collection of rows. We'd like to improve access to this data in Blueprints in the future, but don't have any immediate plans, although custom struct support will probably make it much easier now.

Note: Having the .blend file is extremely useful since often importing FBX back into Blender to test is a difficult process.

We are working on providing a way to submit these directly to us without being publicly visible but for now that isnt ready. If you can't share one of your production assets anything no matter how simple that reproduces the problem would be helpful.

1. Are there plans for real time collaboration within unreal engine 4 editor for remote teams?
Ideally:
I would like to see a solution where we can host a dedicated server for other developers to connect to it.
Have assets be populated into our content browser.
When that is done we can start dragging out our static meshes, Blueprints, etc. and updates will happen in the editor in realtime across our teams computers.

2. Questions regarding Unreal Engines 2D Abilities -
- Will there be support for various grid types for reference within unreal engine? Examples being - Hex Grid, Top Down, Isometric, etc. not just side scrolling.
- Will there be a dedicated map editor similar to tiled map editor but taliored specific for Unreal Engine 4?